Lots of people have been writing in to me with features they’d like to see here at the Cafes, especially with regard to the comment system. Some of these were already on my TODO list, but the site seemed to work and be useful now, so I didn’t want to wait to launch to implement absolutely everything. So herewith, in no particular order, is a peek at my TODO list:
The Cafes seems to be off and running. There were a few initial glitches that I have now cleaned up. Today’s project is to make the staging server work enough like the production server that I can use it for testing and debugging without affecting the production server. Yesterday I got stymied by a slight difference in how the PHP engines were configured. (The staging server didn’t have libtidy support that the site relies on heavily.)
At least three people tried to post with fictional or nospam e-mail addresses. Sorry. That won’t work. Anonymous posters are not supported. You must supply a valid e-mail address at least once to post, and it will be verified. It’s sad, but the biggest issue that has been raised most consistently by users is an unwillingness to provide an e-mail address due to fear of spam and worm droppings. While I hate spam as much as the next person, I am loathe to break a useful feature like mailto links just to avoid spambots. It’s the wrong solution to the problem. I am a big fan of spam filters including realtime black hole lists. If you’re not using them, you should be. If your ISP isn’t using them, you should find a new ISP. But in the meantime, I do wonder if there might be a middle ground that confuses spambots, Microsoft worms, and other venomous spiders without putting any noticeable roadbloacks in the path of legitimate users.
Welcome to The Cafes, a new site from Elliotte Rusty Harold for content that’s longer than a blog posting and shorter than a book.
This site is currently alpha at best. While I encourage you to bang on it, please do not expect it to be stable, at least not yet. As The Mythical Man-Month taught us, “Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.” This is the one I plan to throw away. If you post really long, well thought-out comments, please, please, please save your work on your local system first. I make no promises that early comments will be preserved here or even accepted into the database in the first place. The comments system is held together by duct tape and spackle (and PHP, and MySQL, and a few other tools). Even if it actually works for long enough for a comment to be posted, the likelihood I’ll be able to preserve all those comments over a period of years or even weeks is not good. I expect I will need to do major reengineering on the back end sooner rather than later that may involve throwing it out and starting over from scratch.
